The Burning Shore - Smith Wilbur - Страница 93
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Please let it stop now. The San suffered the cold with the fortitude they showed for all hardship. Rather than slackening, the rain seemed to increase in tempo, and hid the sorry drowned land from them behind a glassy curtain.
Then the rain stopped. There was no warning, no faltering or tapering off; one second it was falling in a solid cascade and the next it was over. The ceiling of low bruised cloud split open and peeled away like the skin from a ripe fruit, revealing the clean washed blue of the sky, and the sun burst upon them with blinding brilliance, once more stunning Centaine with the sudden contrasts of this wild continent.
Before noon, the thirsty earth had drunk down the waters that had fallen upon it. The floods sank away without trace. Only in the pan itself surface water still lay glittering sulphurous-yellow from bank to far bank.
However, the land was cleansed and vivid with colour.
The dust that had coated each bush and tree was washed away and Centaine saw greens that she had never dreamed this tan, lion-coloured land could contain. The earth, still damp, was rich with ochres and oranges and reds and the songs of the little desert larks were joyous.
They laid out their scant possessions in the sun and they steamed as they dried. O'wa could not contain himself and be danced ecstatically.
The cloud spirits have opened the road for us. They have replenished the water-holes to the east. Make ready, H'ani, my little flower of the desert: before the dawn tomorrow we will march.
Within the first day's march they entered a new country, so different that Centaine could scarcely believe it was on the same continent. Here the ancient dunes had compacted and consolidated into gentle undulations, and they now supported abundant plant life.
Stands of mopani and tall kiaat, alternating with almost impenetrable thickets of paper-bark, stood tall along the ridges of high ground where the dunes crests had weathered and flattened. Occasionally a giant silver terminalia or a monumental bac, hah soared seventy feet above the rest of the forest.
in the valleys, fields of sweet golden grasses and scattered giraffe acacias with flat tops gave the scene a park-like and cultivated aspect.
Here also, in the lowest depressions, the recent rains had been trapped in the shallow water-holes, and the land seemed to hum and seethe with life.
Through the yellow grasses fresh tender shoots of delicate green appeared. Gardens of wild flowers, daisies and arum lilies and gladioli and fifty other varieties which Centaine did not recognize, sprang up as though at a F magician's flourish, delighting her with their colours and delicate beauty, and causing her to wonder anew at Africa's prolificness. She picked the blooms and plaited them into necklaces for herself and H'ani, and the old woman preened like a bride.
Oh, I wish I had a mirror to show you how adorable you look. Centaine embraced her.
Even from the sky Africa gave of her abundance. There were flocks of quelea thick as hiving bees as they wheeled overhead, shrikes in the undergrowth with chests of purest glowing ruby, sandgrouse and francolin fat as domestic chickens, and water fowl on the brimming waterholes, wild duck and long-legged stilts and gaunt blue heron.
It's all so beautiful, Centaine exulted. Each day's journey was light and carefree after the hardships of the and western plains, and when they camped, there was the untold luxury of unlimited water and a Least of wild fruits and nuts and game from O'wa's snares and arrows.
One evening O'wa climbed high into the swollen fleshy branches of a monstrous baobab and smoked the hive that had inhabited its hollow trunk since his great-grandfather's time and beyond. He came down with a gourd full of thick waxen combs running with dark honey redolent of the perfume of the yellow acacia blossoms.
Each day they met new species of wild animals: sable antelope, black as night with long scimitar horns that swept back almost to their hind quarters, and Cape buffalo with mournful drooping heads of massively bossed horn stinking like herds of domestic cattle.
They have come down from the big river and the swamps, O'wa. explained. They follow the water, and when it dries again they will go back into the north. In the night Centaine woke to a new sound infinitely more fearsome than the yelping of the black-backed jackal or the maniacal screams and sobs of the hyena packs. It was a storm of sound that filled the darkness, rising to an impossible crescendo and then dying away in a series of deep grunts. Centaine scrambled out of her little hut and ran to H'ani.
What was that, old grandmother? It is a sound to turn the belly to water! Centaine found she was trembling and the old woman hugged her.
Even the bravest of men trembles the first time he hears the roar of the lion, she placated her. But do not fear, Nam Child, O'wa has made a charm to protect us.
The lion will find other game tonight But they crowded close to the fire all the rest of the night, feeding it with fresh logs, and it was obvious that H'ani had as little faith in her husband's magical charms as Centaine did.
The lion pride circled their camp site, keeping at the very limit of the firelight so that Centaine caught only an occasional pale flicker of movement amongst the dark, encroaching bushes, but with the dawn their dreadful chorus receded as they moved away into the east, and when O'wa showed her the huge catlike pugmarks in the soft earth, he was garrulous with relief.
Then on the ninth morning after they had left the pan of the big white place, they were approaching another water-hole through the open mopani forests when ahead of them there was a crack like a shot of cannon and they all froze.
What is it, H'ani? But she waved Centaine to silence, and now she heard the crackle of breaking undergrowth and then suddenly a ringing blast of sound clear as a trumpet call.
Quickly O'wa tested the wind as Centaine had seen him do at the beginning of every hunt, and then he led them in a wide stealthy circuit through the forest until he stopped again beneath the spreading glossy green foliage of a tall mopani tree where he laid aside his weapons and his pack.
Come! he signalled to Centaine and, swiftly as a monkey, shinned up the trunk. Hardly hampered at all by her fruitful belly, Centaine followed him into the tree and from a fork in the top branches looked down into the valley of grassland beyond and the water-hole that it contained in its shallow bottom.
Elephant! She recognized the huge grey beasts instantly. They were streaming down the far slope of the valley towards the water, striding out with their ponderous rolling gait, heads swinging so that their enormous ears flapped, and their trunks rolling and reaching reflexively as they anticipated the sweet taste of water.
There were rangy old queens with tattered ear-lobes and the knuckles of their spines sticking out of their gaunt backs, young bulls with yellow ivories, tuskless youngsters, boisterous unweaned calves running to keep up with their dams and, at their head, the herd bull strode majestically.
He stood over ten feet tall at the shoulder and he was scarred and grey, thick baggy skin hanging from his knees and bunched between his back legs. His ears were spread like the mainsail. of a tall ship, and his tusks were twice as long and thick as any of his lesser bulls.
He seemed aged and yet ageless, huge and rugged, possessed of a grandeur and mystery which seemed to Centaine to contain the very essence of this land.
Lothar De La Rey cut the spoor of the elephant herd three days after they had left the Cunene river, and he and his Ovambo trackers studied it carefully, spreading out and circling over the trodden earth like gundogs. When they assembled again, Lothar nodded at his headman.
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